Idaho's Weekly Journal of Local & National Commentary Week
2815

What is the proper free market
relationship between business and government?

Let's review a couple of fundamentals that both businessmen and legislators
seem to have forgotten:

Corporations are not formed to produce jobs or health insurance or
education or housing for the public. They are not welfare bureaus. They
are free market traders who expect to be treated fairly in a free market.

Corporations are formed to take a risk, move capital to meet demand, and
hopefully earn profits for their investors by producing time and labor
saving services or commodities for consumers in mutually agreed upon
exchanges.

The state was not formed to play the role of economic Big Brother. The
state was formed by free people to protect their individual rights
obtained from Nature, to protect them from infringements by others,
especially the government. The function of a limited constitutional
government is to provide objective justice in a free market, not to
participate as a player dispensing corporate or blue-collar welfare.

Business is best left to business. Justice is best left to an objective
state. Those businesses who seek special government protection from
competition, whether in the form of monetary subsidies or laws against their
competitors, are not free marketeers but rather socialist sycophants of the
state.

If Micron is demanding the reduction or elimination of various Idaho
taxes for ALL businesses large and small, on free market principles, then I
support Micron's proposal. If, however, Micron is simply groveling for
special corporate welfare in Idaho, then I do not support its special
legislation.

Those politicians who claim that a reduction in Idaho taxes foils their
statist plans for continued big government spending should re-think their
position. The people do not become wealthy or safe or secure or more
intelligent or more healthy because of government-mandated wealth
redistribution programs. They, in fact, become impoverished. The people --
especially the poorest -- reap great benefits by receiving products and
services made possible by free marketeers risking their own capital in a
true free market. The only function of the state is to protect individual
rights to freely exchange ideas, commodities and services -- including
education, health care, and “social security” (which are not exempt from
free market principles and should be totally privatized).
The real question is not how much should the state allow free marketeers to
think, to create, to produce, to retain, to freely exchange or to exist.
The real question is, by what right does the state interfere in the business
of free market corporations and individuals who are freely exchanging in a
voluntary market?

It is a fallacy to believe that businesses exist for state taxes. They do
not and should not. Businesses are individual entities that exist for
themselves. Free market consumers should decide the fate of
corporations, not state
politicians. Those who continually argue the socialist pablum of the
alleged rights of state welfare recipients -- whether it be for statist
education, statist health care, or statist blue-collar welfare or statist
corporate welfare -- should re-read Atlas Shrugged and hope the men and
women of ideas, the thinkers, the true creators of wealth don’t figure it
out and go on strike.

Let me remind Idaho politicians that future corporations -- and I happen to
know of one that is a multi-quadrillion dollar, privately-financed,
international energy company -- are watching to determine whether Idaho is a
free market state or a socialist corporate welfare state. Laissez-faire,
legislators. Long term free trade for all, not just for Micron and
Albertsons.